The Ruins of Karzelek (The Mandrake Company series Book 4)

by Lionsdrake, Ruby

  Sedge sighed.

  A chime came from behind his head. Someone had taken off his jacket and folded it for a pillow. He sat up and pulled it into his lap, waving at the comm-patch. “Lieutenant Thomlin.”

  “Mandrake,” came the captain’s gruff, terse voice.

  Out of habit, Sedge climbed to his feet, as if the captain could see him. “Yes, sir?”

  “The Blackwell woman there? We have an assignment or not? Thatcher couldn’t give me an affirmative.”

  Sedge looked toward Kalish and raised his eyebrows. “We’re in her tent, sir. Shall I have Ms. Blackwell contact you?”

  “Yes, I want to know if we’re hired. And if we’re not hired, I want to know why my shuttles are flying all over that planet, burning fuel.”

  Sedge almost responded that they were searching for cave entrances, but remembered that he had supposedly been unconscious when Kalish had been talking with her mother about that. “Understood, sir.”

  Kalish was watching him. Wondering if he had been awake for longer than he let on? He hoped not. He tugged off the comm-patch and offered it to her. “I left it open if you want to speak with the captain now.”

  Kalish hesitated, then accepted it and walked to the desk. “Mandrake Company? This is Kalish Blackwell.”

  A moment later, Viktor Mandrake’s head and broad shoulders appeared in the air above it, his green eyes hard, his face as stern as usual. Once or twice, Sedge had seen the captain amused, but he usually reserved those glimpses of humanity for the original men who had founded the company with him, most refugees from his destroyed home world. Sedge had only been with the outfit for a year, so he didn’t qualify. He found the captain fair, despite his gruffness, but he did grow wistful from time to time, wondering what it would be like to feel a part of the family.

  “Good evening, Captain,” Kalish said. “Though my information wasn’t as reliable as I had hoped, your men satisfactorily completed the first stage of this mission.”

  Mandrake grunted. As always, he was a man of many words.

  “Your shuttles are looking for an entrance to the underground cavern system we need to enter. Once they succeed, we’ll be ready for you to help us with Stage Two.”

  “Which is?”

  When Kalish had first contacted Mandrake Company, she had hinted of work that would keep the Albatross busy in space while an infiltration team worked on the planet. And she had spoken to her mother of an outright attack. Sedge leaned forward, eager for more details.

  “We need a one-week distraction. I’m hoping it will be more like a few days, but the caverns are immense, so I don’t want to be overly optimistic.” From the way she grimaced, Kalish might think even one week wouldn’t be enough.

  “A distraction,” Mandrake said, sounding about as enthused as if she had asked him to grind metal with his teeth.

  “I want the workers in that compound too pinned down to think about going into the mines to work this week, but I don’t want anyone killed.” Kalish closed her eyes and swallowed. “Anyone else. Still, I need them too busy to send their ships in and definitely too busy to notice us poking around in there. They shouldn’t be able to get help out here from corporate in a week, and maybe you can even knock out their satellite and scramble their long-distance communications so they can’t call for that help.”

  “You want them to attack the compound?” Tick asked, scratching his head. He and Striker hadn’t left after they had delivered their equipment. They were sitting near the far wall of the tent, enjoying the chairs they had brought in. “The miners are going to want to know why.”

  Kalish shrugged. “Maybe you can threaten them by telling them you want some impossible amount of gold. Or that you want the mines themselves.”

  Mandrake’s eyes narrowed. “We are not thieves, Ms. Blackwell.”

  “No, I know. But it would be a ruse.” She spread her arms.

  “A ruse that would incur the wrath of Ferago Enterprises, a giant corporation that has a seat in the government. Ferago supplies the Fleet with much of its raw materials for shipbuilding. GalCon may not care much what mercenaries do out here on the outer rim, so long as their battles only have to do with minor factions on unincorporated planets and in space, but they will care if we openly attack Karzelek’s most lucrative mining outpost. We would go from being mercenaries, a legally registered corporation, to system-wide criminals. Kill-on-sight.”

  The confidence that Kalish had been carrying with her wilted under the captain’s words and under his hard stare. “But you’ve killed finance lords,” she finally said.

  “Prove it.”

  “I...”

  “We’ve done a fairly good job of erasing the records of that,” Sedge said quietly, almost apologetically, since he had been responsible for a lot of that legerdemain. “There are rumors, of course, or you wouldn’t have heard about it, but the government doesn’t have any proof.”

  The expression she gave him was hard to read. It wasn’t annoyed, as he had thought it might be, but somewhere between frustrated and wistful, perhaps? Maybe she was wishing she had someone who could erase the records of what had happened last night for her.

  “I just need a distraction, Captain,” Kalish said. “I don’t care how you accomplish it. All I ask is, as I said, that people not be killed over this.”

  Mandrake’s face grew thoughtful. He would have balked if she had insisted on the bullying and threatening course, but he was probably intrigued by the challenge she was presenting now.

  “I’ll see what we can come up with.”

  Mandrake wasn’t the smartest man Sedge had ever met, instead being one of the deadliest men he had met, but he knew enough to surround himself with smart people. He would call a meeting and see what those people could come up with. Sedge almost wished he was up on the ship now, so he might be invited to be a part of it, but he would not give up a chance to explore alien ruins, especially if Kalish had found previously undiscovered ones..

  “Good,” Kalish said. “Once we’ve found our entrance, preferably far from the miners’ entrance, I’ll be in contact with you.”

  “What’s going on in those mines that’s so special anyway?” Tick asked. “You find out about some extra fine stashes of gold?”

  “Stashes of gold are good,” Striker said, his eyes gleaming.

  Mandrake didn’t throw in any commentary on Tick’s question, but he did watch Kalish’s face intently. He might not pry, but he had to be curious too.

  “It would be premature to say,” Kalish said. “I’ve done my research, but it’s still nebulous as to whether we’ll find anything.”

  “You’re paying us well,” Mandrake said. “It can’t be that nebulous.”

  Kalish’s lips thinned. “Haven’t you heard of desperation, Captain?” She lifted her hand to cut the comm signal, but not before Mandrake glanced over at Sedge, an eyebrow lifting slightly. An instant later, his face disappeared, and Kalish tossed the patch back. Sedge accepted it with a nod.

  “There we go,” Tick said, leaning back from the portable heater he had brought in. Warmth started radiating from its sides. Good. Sedge could still see his breath.

  “What’s next?” Striker asked, leaning back in the chair and folding his hands behind his head. “Start a fire? Roast some marshmallows or candied puffworms? Get naked and explore the limits of our own stamina and creativity?”

  Tick elbowed him. “Go explore your stamina with Betsy.”

  Kalish ignored them. She was swiping her finger through the big hologram, moving data around and exploring the three-dimensional image the mapping software was building.

  “I have to pee,” Sedge announced, making an excuse to head outside. The captain wanted a private report from him. He grabbed his weapons belt and stood to buckle it on.

  “Don’t get too close to that white cactus out there,” Striker said. “Lots of thorns. You wouldn’t want to get poked. Your prick might be allergic. That’s a body part you probably don’t wa
nt all swelled up.” He smirked and nodded at Kalish. “Or maybe you do.”

  Kalish looked toward Sedge, not as engrossed in her computer work as one might have hoped. She glanced down his form for an instant before looking back to the hologram. Sedge headed outside so nobody would see the way his cheeks reddened at the thought of her imagining his penis as some bloated whale with thorns sticking out of it. Or maybe it was the thought of her imagining his penis at all that flustered him.

  “Didn’t they have manners where you grew up, Striker?” Tick asked. “Some sort of notion that there are things you shouldn’t say in the presence of women?”

  “Nah, grew up on Frontier Colony. The women there are tougher than bullets and curse twice as much as the men. They also chew fenwad and spikes, not sissy strawberry gum, like a ten-year-old girl.”

  “You’re insulting my gum? It’s got adrenocharge in it. See if I share a hit with you the next time we’re humping it through a jungle with a hundred pounds on our backs.”

  That was the last of the conversation that Sedge heard. He fished his tablet out of his pocket, thumbed on the flashlight feature, and powered up the hand warmer as well. It had dropped well below freezing after nightfall, and he hoped the captain wouldn’t want to talk for long. He didn’t have that much information to share anyway. He hoped the captain would not be disappointed. He didn’t want to make excuses about being unconscious for however long that had been.

  Sedge saw the thorny white cactus and avoided it, choosing a less prickly spot to take care of biological needs. As soon as he finished and moved far enough from the tent that nobody would overhear, he tapped his comm-patch. He kept the video from displaying, not wanting to attract attention if anyone else wandered out of the tent to relieve himself—or herself—though given the temperature, the prudent person might hold it until morning.

  “Mandrake,” came the curt answer. The fact that the transmission wasn’t routed through anyone on the bridge told Sedge that the captain had indeed been waiting, perhaps not all that patiently.

  “Thomlin reporting, sir.”

  “Yes, what more do you know? Thatcher has been flying around all night and had little to report. You’re in Blackwell’s camp, right?”

  “Yes, sir. I was injured.” Sedge wasn’t sure why he added that information. He had not intended to make an excuse, nor ask for sympathy, but he wanted the captain to know he hadn’t been relaxing on duty. “Kalish—er, Ms. Blackwell—is being cagey about what she reveals.” He wished he could see Mandrake’s face to know if he had reacted to that slipup. On second thought, maybe he didn’t want to see. “But I find it likely she’s seeking ancient alien ruins rather than ore. She has a historian’s background, and I believe she either has the specific coordinates of a site that hasn’t been documented and explored, or she has a good idea as to where the location might be. She must expect to find valuable artifacts, because I heard her speaking about making enough to come out ahead after paying off the company.”

  “So long as she does intend to pay the company.”

  “Yes, sir. She seems...” Sedge thought of Kalish’s distress over the miners they had shot. “Honorable.”

  Mandrake grunted.

  Sedge couldn’t tell if it was a grunt of skepticism or merely one of acknowledgment. He rubbed his hands together, wishing he had thought to find some gloves before coming outside, and debated whether to share the other information that he had overheard, the fact that Kalish’s father seemed to be under duress somewhere. It was personal and certainly not something she would want shared. But it could end up affecting the company. That was where his loyalty lay, he reminded himself.

  “Anything else?” Mandrake asked.

  Even if he felt like he was betraying Kalish, Sedge said, “It may not have any impact on us, but it sounds like someone might be holding her father hostage, perhaps in return for whatever is believed to be in the ruins.”

  “Noted. Report in as soon as you have more intel.”

  “Yes, sir.” Before he finished speaking, Sedge was turning back to the tent, his hands stuffed under his armpits. A flashlight came on not ten feet away from him, highlighting the ground in front of a pair of rugged brown boots. Rugged brown boots that belonged to Kalish.

  She stared at him, her dark eyes flinty. “If you’d like to call him back with more intel,” she said, her voice even frostier than the night, “I don’t have specific coordinates. I have vague directions from an old drunk miner that I’m trying to match with those pathetic hand-drawn maps in there.”

  Sedge opened his mouth, but nothing came out. How had he failed to notice her approaching? And why hadn’t Striker or Tick warned him that she had left the tent? Had they truly thought he had been gone this long, doing nothing more than watering the local flora?

  “As for my father, he’s of no concern to you, and he’s certainly not of any concern to your captain. The next time you’re unconscious around me, I’m going to stab a knife into your thigh to make sure you’re out.” She spun, her slender braids of hair whipping across her back, and stalked back toward the beige outline of the tent.

  “I’m sorry, Kalish,” Sedge tried. “I’m the ship’s intelligence officer. Gathering information is what I do.”

  “You didn’t win our game,” she snapped over her shoulder.

  For a moment, the words confused him, but then he remembered. She had offered him the right to use her first name, but only if he beat her at Crucible.

  “I—”

  An ear-splitting screech erupted from nearby, from no more than ten feet away. The alien cry hammered Sedge’s nerves and made him want to flee. A dark shape crouched atop a boulder right beside Kalish, its silhouette huge against the pink smear of the nebula in the night sky. It sprang from its perch, aiming to land on her.

  * * *

  Kalish spun at the noise, instinctively reaching for the pistol she carried on her belt. But she was too late. A massive shape leaped off a boulder and barreled into her before she could pull out her weapon. She tried to lunge away, but it crashed into her, and claws dug through her jacket, piercing flesh. Pain erupted from her side, even as she was smashed to the ground under hundreds of pounds of weight.

  Laser fire shrieked. She hadn’t managed to pull out her own weapon, though she had a hand on the grip, and her first thought was she had shot through the holster at some worthless target. Like her own foot. She tried to yank the weapon free, but whatever had landed on her had her pinned. Her flashlight had been knocked away, and she couldn’t tell what had attacked her, but she could smell its fetid breath as rocks ground into her back. Something splashed against her cheek. Saliva?

  She bucked, trying to free herself, to shove the writhing creature away. A laser fired again, and she realized one of the men was helping her. That gave her the strength to push and shove, almost frenzied in her rush to escape those claws. Finally, she squirmed free. She rolled away, yanking out her pistol and pointing it back in the direction of her assailant.

  Sedge stood over the hulking predator, a flashlight in one hand and his pistol in the other, both pointed at the creature. The big, sand-colored, scaly figure wasn’t moving, and Kalish, in reviewing the last few seconds, realized it had probably been dead before it fully landed on her. There was no doubt its claws had dug in and drawn blood—she dropped a hand to her side, wincing at the light touch—but Sedge must have hit it while it was still in the air.

  Footsteps pounded behind her, Tick and Striker rushing out of the tent.

  “Damn it,” Striker said, “we missed the fun?”

  Sedge shifted the flashlight, focusing on the blood spotting the dirt for a second, then lifting it to Kalish’s torso. “You’re injured,” he said, stepping around the fallen beast and toward her. “How badly? Here. Let me help you back into the—”

  A second screech rang out from the boulder field, and then a third. From the same creature or another? Kalish couldn’t tell.

  “The tent,” Sedge finis
hed, grimacing into the darkness.

  “Something that big will crush those walls,” Kalish said, but she headed for the tent anyway. If nothing else, there were better lights in there that they could use.

  “You two, go in there,” Tick said. “Get us some lights.”

  “That’s right.” Striker patted his belt, which held a row of grenades as well as ammo pouches with backup laser packs. “Let the Chief of Boom keep out the wildlife.” His eyes gleamed, as if this were a game he couldn’t wait to play. Kalish hoped his confidence wasn’t misplaced.

  Another screech sounded, this time from boulders on the other side of the tent.

  “That’s a lot of wildlife,” Tick said, taking up a back-to-back position with Striker as Kalish and Sedge ducked into the tent.

  “This will make a great addition to my comic strip,” Striker announced.

  “Assuming you live to draw it,” Tick said.

  “Captain said he’d finish it if I ever got killed during a real epic battle.”

  Kalish shuddered as she grabbed the lamp from the desk, regretting that she had sent all the ships away. Right now, she would much rather have a thick metal hull between her and the elements than a fabric wall. She took the lamp outside and set it on the ground, turning it to its highest power in the hope that such brightness might scare away the predators. At the least, it would let the mercenaries see what was coming for them.

  “Over here,” Sedge said, taking her arm and nodding toward a rock formation that rose well above their heads. Another screech came, almost drowning out the words.

  Kalish got the gist though and joined him there. They put their backs to the boulders. Blood trickled down her rib cage inside of her shirt, but fear was charging her veins with adrenaline, and she didn’t feel much pain yet. She hoped the injury wasn’t bad enough that she needed to worry about blood loss.

  Tick fired at the tops of a trio of boulders in the distance, short laser bursts that lit up the night beyond the light’s influence. Rock exploded, with shards flying everywhere, but he didn’t hit anything moving.